There was that game in 2006 when Justin High went five innings without hitting a fair ball. Fifteen up, fifteen down, fifteen strikeouts. By then Highland Park was far enough ahead for the mercy rule to take effect, and the major league scouts hurried to fill out their reports on lefthander Clayton Kershaw. They’d seen what they needed to see, except maybe whether he could field his position.
“You can take a lawn chair out there if you’re playing behind him,” said one of his teammates on the Scots, who played their home games in Scotland Yard, bordering a busy Dallas thoroughfare. Kershaw’s catcher at Highland Park was Matthew Stafford, who would go to Georgia to play quarterback. Kershaw had committed to Texas A&M but dollar diplomacy would divert him to the pros, and the Dodgers had the No. 7 pick in the first round. Dodger scout Calvin Jones knew that Detroit also wanted a lefthander. “I was in the draft room waiting for Detroit and saying, ‘Take Miller,’’ Jones said later. The Tigers did indeed take Andrew Miller from North Carolina, whom they parlayed into a trade that brought them Miguel Cabrera.
Nineteen seasons later, Kershaw has announced his retirement. It’s possible that Class of ‘06 member Max Scherzer, pitching for Toronto, will outlast him, but Kershaw seems at peace with it. On Friday night he started his final home game of the regular season for the Dodgers, his only team during all this time. Heliot Ramos of the Giants led off and homered, and Kershaw didn’t have his best command, but he fought his way through 91 pitches and four and two-thirds innings, and left with San Francisco ahead, 2-1. He seemed relieved, and got warm hugs from everyone in uniform and an accolade bath from everyone in the stadium. Then Shohei Ohtani gave him what he really wanted, a 3-run homer that got Kershaw off the hook, and the Dodgers won, 6-3.
Stafford was there, too. In one of the many grace notes that has typified Kershaw’s waning years, Stafford came to L.A. and won a Super Bowl after years of injury and team futility in Detroit. Postseasons had not been kind to Kershaw, but in 2020 the Dodgers won the World Series, and he held the trophy while a blue Covid-19 mask dangled from his neck. Kershaw wasn’t on the active roster last year when L.A. won again. Still, the two Scots were able to square the circle together. Kershaw and Stafford have earned a total of $705 million. Not even Tesla has batteries that expensive.
Such a warm and fuzzy evening did not seem possible two years ago, when Kershaw started Game 1 of the N.L. Division Series and walked into a shooting gallery. He retired one of eight Arizona batters. No other pitcher in playoff history had given up five runs and five hits before getting an out. He left after 35 pitches and Arizona won, 11-2, and then mercifully swept the Dodgers before they could decide whether to use Kershaw again. This came at the end of a 13-5 season with a 2.46 ERA. Shoulder surgery and a toe injury followed, and Kershaw pitched only seven games in 2024 and surprised more than a few fans when he returned for 2025. He didn’t appear until May 17. But he wound up 10-2, and pitched 102 innings, third-most on the staff, bridging several gaps while others did their rehab. That made retirement palatable, not for the fans’ memories, but for his.
Justin Verlander was in the other dugout, the only current pitcher who can occupy the same rung as Kershaw. He is 42, and lost his first eight decisions this season, but in the past four starts he has given up one run, and there’s little doubt he’ll pitch somewhere in 2026. Verlander was drafted two years before Kershaw, by the Tigers, and has an MVP and three Cy Young Awards, as Kershaw does, plus 265 wins. But Kershaw has a .698 win percentage, best in baseball history since 1877, when Al Spalding hung them up. Kershaw has lost only 96 games in his career. That’s in 449 starts, and that’s crazy. He also has a career WHIP of 1.017, second only to Jacob deGrom among starting pitchers in the past 108 years.
The fact that Kershaw did all that, straight out of Scotland Yard, puts him in yet another category. He was the first high school pitcher drafted in 2006. Max Fried, Jackson Taillon and Hunter Greene had the same distinction, but they’re the only ones since Kershaw who have survived the buffering and fashioned notable careers. The rest are names like Ethan Martin, Jarrod Parker, Kohl Stewart,, Brady Aiken, Koby Allard, Jackson Rutledge and Matt Hobgood, all of them left stranded by injury or the eventual catchup process. College pitchers are a far safer bet.
But Kershaw had ample support, from his talks with Sandy Koufax in Vero Beach, to faithful pitching coach and fellow lefty Rick Honeycutt, to his natural arrhythmic delivery, to his realization that nothing can be allowed to disrupt the routine. Those four days between starts were mapped out meticulously, which may be why Kershaw sometimes struggled in the postseason, when the Dodgers carelessly had him to pitch out of sequence. Yet he took the ball whenever it was presented, most memorably at the end of a clinching Game 5 in the 2016 Division Series at Washington. It was his first save since the minor leagues, when his catcher was Kenley Jansen, who of course spent years saving Kershaw’s Dodger wins.
Friday night’s violins were so loud and plaintive because no one knows how the Dodgers will use Kershaw in October. Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are the top three starters. In Ohtani’s last start he was hitless through five innings. Yet the Dodger bullpen has been a wasteland, and Ohtani, accustomed to short bursts, did after all handle the ninth inning when Japan won the World Baseball Classic. Every team spills coffee on its pitching blueprint during the postseason, so you can envision Kershaw handling middle-inning problems, or coming in to get the one big lefthanded threat, or becoming the fourth starter if Ohtani indeed relieves. And, of course, a major pitching injury is only a slider away, especially if a Dodger is throwing it.
This was not a night to juggle any of those possibilities, or bring back the dread from blown leads past. This was a This Is Your Life moment for the man with the longest string of sustained pitching excellence in franchise history. So stern for so many years, Kershaw was able to join the celebration, not just receive it. The mercy rule can work both ways.
"So stern for so many years, Kershaw was able to join the celebration, not just receive it. The mercy rule can work both ways." Whick, this is why they still let you do this . . .
Outstanding pitcher. Outstanding column.